Tuesday, September 2, 2014

With Hemingway in Paris - Liberating the Ritz - August 1944

OSS Officer David Bruce (Left) with Ernest Hemingway and French Resistance Partisans 30 miles outside Paris, August 1944

Lee
Harvey Oswald – Like Hemingway Went to Paris

In
trying to discern how and why Lee Harvey Oswald went to Russia, there are a few
interesting references in the files. Oswald himself once said that not even his
wife Marina knew why he defected to the Soviet Union, and in a letter to Navy
Secretary John Connally, who he was later accused of shooting, Oswald said that
he went to Russia like Hemingway went to Paris.

Oswald’s
offhand reference to Hemingway in Paris led John Judge and myself to write an
article – Bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA – which explores how many American
journalists worked undercover as agents and assets of the CIA, MI6 and other
intelligence services, including Hemignway, who worked closely in Key West and
Cuba with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and in Europe with the OSS –
Office of Strategic Services.

Now those
who have studied Ernest Hemingway know that the renown American writer lived in
Paris in the 1920s, before he was famous and when he was broke, and couldn’t
afford the cost of a martini at the Hotel Ritz bar.

But as
those who have read the history of the Office of the Strategic Services (OSS)
know, Hemingway also went to Paris with Captain David Bruce, of the OSS,
America’s wartime espionage and special operations agency before the CIA.

Bruce
and Hemingway hooked up in a small town outside of Paris, and drank their way
to the Ritz Hotel, where Hemingway accomplished his self-proclaimed mission of
being the first American in Paris and to liberate the bar of the Ritz Hotel.

David
Bruce went on to become Hemingway’s best man at his wedding, and to serve
honorably as John F. Kennedy’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the post
his father had held under Roosevelt, and also as distinguished ambassador to
France and Germany under other presidents.

Oswald,
while working at Jaggers/Chiles/Stoval graphics arts firm in Dallas who placed
arrows and captions on “US Army Map Service) photos of the missiles taken by
the U2, and it was Bruce who was briefed in London by Arthur Lundel of the
CIA’s National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) on the presence of Soviet
missile in Cuba.

Did
Oswald know that it was Capt. David Bruce of the OSS who accompanied Hemingway
to Paris in August 1944, and his reference to going to Russia like Hemingway
went to Paris was more like Hemingway going to Paris with the OSS rather than
as an emerging literary giant?

Many of
Hemingway’s papers can be found at the JFK Library in Boston, and Oswald’s good
friend George deMohrenschildt – a “Hemingwayesque” character, killed himself
with a shotgun in the same fashion as Hemigway, who managed, even in death, to
get involved in the CIA plots to kill Castro.

As an
example of the determination of JFK and RFK to kill Castro, those who try to
pin the blame for JFK’s assassination on his brother Robert point to the
“Hemigway Plot,” which is documented in CIA records released under the JFK Act.
They show that Hemingway’s widow Mary received a visit from Fidel Castro while
she was collecting his papers and belongings from their Cuban beach house.
Castro arrived in an open jeep, and offered Mary Hemingway any assistance, and
then climbed the elevated cabin where Hemingway went to write. The CIA papers
indicate RFK took particular interest in Mary Hemingway’s account, and the CIA
itself thought that if Castro’s travel destinations were known, such as a visit
to Hemingway’s house, he could be ambushed and shot by a sniper, just as JFK was.

I don’t
know what was going through the mind of Oswald the defector when he claimed to
have gone to Russia like Hemingway went to Paris, or Oswald the Fall Guy, who
claimed he was a patsy, but I found the story of how Hemingway and David Bruce
liberated the bar at the Ritz very interesting, if not inebriating.

PARIS:
The liberation of the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris by the
writer Ernest
Hemingway 70
years ago, as the French capital was freed from its Nazi
occupiers, is the stuff of legend. When he discovered the bar in the late 1920s
in the company of Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway was broke; this was
before he became known for such works as “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell
to Arms.”

He would
later develop a special attachment to the luxurious Ritz Hotel and its bar,
where he spent a great deal of time before the war.

“When I
dream of afterlife in heaven,” Hemingway was later to say, “the action always
takes place in the Paris Ritz.”

During
the war, he worked as a correspondent for the American “Collier’s” magazine,
and was embedded with U.S. 4th Division troops who
landed on the Normandy beaches
on June 6, 1944.

Over the
next two months, he stuck with the soldiers as they marched toward Paris in
support of the French 2nd Armored Division, which entered the capital August
25.

“He did
not talk about anything else,” one Resistance fighter said, but “to be the
first American in Paris and liberate the Ritz.”

Hemingway
managed, using his name and with the help of the American army, to wrangle a
meeting with French commander General Philippe Leclerc.

His
request: To be given enough men to go and liberate the Ritz’s bar.

To the
writer’s surprise, he got a frosty reception, and was dismissed.

But
Hemingway persevered and on Aug. 25, dressed in his correspondent’s uniform, he
arrived in a commandeered jeep with a machine gun and a group of Resistance
fighters at the hotel, on Paris’ lovely Place Vendome.

He burst
into the hotel and announced that he had come to personally liberate it and its
bar, which had been requisitioned in June 1940 by the Nazis and occupied by
German dignitaries, including Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels.

The
manager of the hotel, Claude Auzello, approached him and he asked: “Where are
the Germans? I have come to liberate the Ritz.”

“Monsieur,”
he replied, “They left a long time ago. And I cannot let you enter with a
weapon.”

Hemingway
put the gun in the jeep and came back to the bar, where he is said to have run
up a tab for 51 dry Martinis.

According
to his brother, Leicester Hemingway, the writer
searched the cellar with his men, taking two prisoners and finding an excellent
stock of brandy.

Inspecting
the upper floors and roofs of the hotel, they found nothing except for sheets,
which they riddled with bullets.

Hemingway
wrote later that he could not stand the thought that the Germans had soiled the
room he shared with Mary Welsh, whom he would marry in 1946.

“He wore
the uniform and gave orders with such authority that many thought he was a
general,” the Ritz’s head barman Colin Field remembered.

The
hotel, which has been closed for renovations ever since 2012, named a smaller
bar after Hemingway in 1994.

2004-08-22
04:00:00 PDT Paris -- No, this is not another story about the 60th
anniversary of the invasion of Normandy. This is about another 60th anniversary
-- the anniversary of the day Ernest Hemingway and his private army invaded
Paris and liberated the Ritz hotel.

It was
in Paris that Ernest Hemingway and his copains of the Lost Generation had
nurtured the myth of the rugged expatriate writer during the 1920s -- Sylvia
Beach and her bookshop; lurching through the bars with Scott Fitzgerald;
literary teas with Ford Madox Ford; earnest chats with Gertrude
Stein. The Ritz was the fabled 19th century hotel on the Place Vendôme where
Hemingway, before he was a best-selling author, could afford to drink only once
a week. Later, after the royalties started rolling in, he more than made up for
lost time.

In
August of 1944, Hemingway was itching, if not dying, to get back to the
"moveable feast" of Paris, particularly since the "Krauts,"
as he liked to call them, had rolled into Paris in 1940 and commandeered his
beloved Ritz to quarter their generals. This did not sit well with the hotel's
most famous prewar guest.

"My
own war aim at this moment," Hemingway wrote in one of his dispatches
for Collier's magazine in the fall of 1944,
"was to get into Paris without being shot. Our necks had been out for a
long time. Paris was going to be taken." And he was going to do it.

Hemingway
had already had a brief sortie at the D-Day landings -- he was in a landing
craft that zoomed into Omaha Beach on the seventh wave before charging back out
to the relative safety of a transport ship, where the landing craft skipper
could offload his famous passenger. Six weeks later, Hemingway made his way
back to Normandy, by plane this time, and followed the infantry as it slogged
down through northern France.

Ten years
ago, during all the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Allied
invasion of Normandy, I went to France to research the tale of how Hemingway
landed in France and took his own particular route to the liberation of Paris.
The timing was right: Many of the people who had been with the author during
this part of the war were getting on in years and were eager to share their
reminiscences, and some of those interviewed have since passed away.

Staging ground

To see
how Hemingway got back to the Ritz -- that is, "liberated" the Ritz
-- you have to go to Rambouillet, a town about 30 miles southwest of Paris.
This was Hemingway's staging area for his assault on Paris, the place where he
formed his little army of partisans and Resistance fighters, numbering anywhere
from 10 to 200, depending on the account. Here he was, the world's most famous
writer, barreling down country roads in his Army jeep, clad in steel helmet and
fatigues and running an arsenal out of a French hotel.

Nearly
everybody who encountered Hemingway in that week before the liberation said the
man was completely in his element -- sticking his neck out, testing his
bravery, sweating and drinking and toiling around with soldiers.

"He
enjoyed that whole time," Evangeline Bruce, then 74, told me, "more
than he had enjoyed anything." Her late husband, OSS Col. David Bruce, who
later was the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Paris and
Bonn, was with Hemingway on the way into Paris.

"On
nineteenth (of August 1944), made contact with group of Maquis who placed
themselves under my command. Because so old and ugly looking I guess,"
Hemingway wrote to his about-to-be fourth wife, Mary Welsh. "Clothed them
with clothing of cavalry recon outfit which had been killed at entrance to
Rambouillet. Armed them from Div. Took and held Rambouillet after our recon
withdrawn. Ran patrols and furnished gen (intelligence) to French when they
advanced. They operated on our gen with much success."

I
wondered how much of this was Hemingway on a roll, fiction getting mixed up in
fact? What was he like as an ersatz commando? The best way to find out was to
talk to some of the people who were with him. Some of the answers came from
retired war correspondents and ex-OSS members now scattered around the United
States. I found others in the countryside where Hemingway spent that week.

Several
people around Rambouillet, a city of about 25,000, remembered the liberation
quite clearly, but few knew about Hemingway. One of them was Jean Miserey, who had flown P-38s for
the Royal Air Force. Miserey took me on a driving
tour of the town, pointing out the Nazis' headquarters (now an office building)
and the Hotel du Grand Veneur, where Hemingway and his band holed up (it's now
a bank). Then, after about an hour, he said, "You know, you really ought
to be talking to Monsieur L'Allinec. I think he may have
met Hemingway."

Then
74, Jean-Marie L'Allinec and his wife, Jacqueline,
live in a comfortable country house in a small town west of Rambouillet. A
gardener was trimming the hedges when I drove in.

"Ah,"
L'Allinec smiled, "I'll bet you're here to talk about Hemingway. Of
course. You know, we went to Paris together. To the Ritz!"

Finding
L'Allinec was like striking gold. At a table on his terrace, he pored over a
Michelin map showing the route he and Hemingway took from Rambouillet to the Ritz.

"It
was all he could talk about," L'Allinec said of Hemingway's obsession to
get back to the Ritz. "It was more than just being the first American in
Paris. He said, 'I will be the first American at the Ritz. And I will liberate
the Ritz.'

"He
was wonderful to be with," L'Allinec said. "He was very sympathique,
he was loud, he was drinking -- he'd tell me, 'Come on, have a drink. Hey,
Jean-Marie, unless you have a drink, there'll be distance between us. We have a
few drinks -- it closes that distance.' "

Playing soldier

Hemingway
did love to drink -- his march on Paris seemed to be punctuated with long,
winey stops at this cafe or that hotel. It's a wonder he ever got to
the Ritz.

"A
guerrilla chief named C said, 'Have a drink of this excellent white wine,'
" he wrote in Collier's about his sojourn with the troops."I took a
long drink from the bottle and it turned out to be a highly alcoholic liqueur
tasting of orange and called Grand Marnier."

By now,
Hemingway, who seemed to have an aversion to sleeping in ditches with the rest
of the troops, had already found the best place in town, a small hotel with a
good wine cellar.

The
renowned author annoyed his colleagues in the working press. They were both
awed by his fame and furious that he was playing soldier, in violation of all
the standing rules about correspondents staying out of the war, even though the
reporters were very much a part of the war effort.

"He
was very gung-ho," Hans Trefousse recalled. Trefousse, now a
history professor at Brooklyn College, was then a 22-year-old Army
prisoner-of-war interrogator. One day, he said, as he was quizzing some
reluctant Germans in Rambouillet, "This man comes along and says, 'My name
is Hemingway.' I said, 'Ernest Hemingway?' and he said, 'Right. What are you
up to?' "

The
slightly startled Trefousse showed Hemingway how you get recalcitrant prisoners
to talk: He would hang signs saying "Russia" around their necks.

In his
helmet and sweat-drenched fatigues, and with his weight at close to 250 pounds,
Hemingway looked more like a hefty master sergeant -- he had turned 45 that
summer -- than a world-heavyweight writer. He had hooked up with David Bruce of
the OSS and Army historians Lt. Col. S.L.A. Marshall and Lt. John Westover, and he was having a ball.

"He
loved soldiering ... being in an armed camp exhilarated him, and he had a
natural way with the military," Marshall wrote later. "He loved
playing soldier on the grand scale, with shooting irons. Yet in him, it was not
a juvenile attitude. I truly believe he played at it more because he enjoyed
the game than because he was interested in studying men under
high pressure."

Liberation libations

On Aug.
24, Hemingway, Bruce and the guerrillas left Rambouillet and started up the
back roads toward Paris. Along the way, they ran into Marshall and Westover at
a cafe on the outskirts of Paris. According to Marshall, Hemingway charged in
and yelled, "Marshall, for God's sake, have you got a drink?"
Westover found a bottle of Scotch in their jeep. The liberation of Paris -- or,
at least, of the Ritz -- would have to wait.

That
night, they camped near the Seine, and at noon the next day, Aug. 25, 1944,
Hemingway and his partisans, along with several American officers, drove their
jeeps across the river at the Pont de Sèvres. Dodging occasional German sniper
fire, they made their way toward the Arc de Triomphe. Near the Bois de
Boulogne, they came under fierce fire and immediately took cover. When one of
their band finally looked up, he saw Hemingway on a third-floor balcony,
yelling at his companions that the Germans were in a nearby house and to get
the hell out of the way because French artillery was coming up to
demolish it.

The Hemingway
crew, which included Col. Bruce, stopped by the Arc de Triomphe for a few
minutes, waited for sniper fire to end, then drove down the deserted
Champs-Elysées and pulled up at the Travellers Club, a private men's club
housed in a rococo 19th century mansion built by one of Paris's more famous
courtesans. Task Force Hemingway chugged down a bottle or two
of Champagne.

The
libationed liberators piled into their jeeps and raced through the empty
streets to the Place de l'Opera, where they stopped briefly at the Café de la
Paix for another drink. Finally, they pulled up at the Rue Cambon entrance of
the Ritz.

Storming
the Ritz

"History
says he jumped out of the Jeep, saying he'd come to liberate the Ritz,"
said Claude Roulet, a Ritz executive who doubles as the hotel's historian.
"Of course, the manager, Claude Auzello, who had known him for years, said
'Leave your gun by the door and come in.' So Hemingway went to the bar and
drank his first Champagne in Paris. Nobody knows what bar it was in, but we
think it was the little bar." (Actually, it was his second bottle of
Champagne -- maybe even his third, at the rate he was going.)

The
"little bar" at the Ritz is a tiny alcove -- less than 300 square
feet -- tucked away on the Rue Cambon side of the hotel. On the bar is a bronze
bust of Hemingway, and on the walls are photographs of the writer and his son
Jack, along with a big game fish of some sort, taken in the 1930s. "Bar
Hemingway" is dark, and if you are quiet and you use a little imagination
(and several martinis) you can picture Hemingway sitting over there in the
corner, arguing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had introduced him to the Ritz in
the '20s.

("Many
years later at the Ritz bar, long after the end of the World War II,"
Hemingway wrote in "A Moveable Feast," "Georges, who is the bar
chief now and who was the chasseur (bellhop) when Scott lived in Paris, asked
me, 'Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me
about?'"

Hemingway
told Georges his pal Fitzgerald was "an American writer" who
"wrote two very good books" and came to the Ritz bar a lot.)

L'Allinec,
the Resistance fighter, said that when they got to the Ritz that day, "The
manager was delirious, he was so happy. He said, 'We resisted the Germans -- we
kept the best premiers crus from them. We saved the Cheval Blanc! ' Papa looked
at him for a moment. Then he said, 'Well, go get it.' They brought up some
bottles and Papa started slugging it down. Imagine! This great old Bordeaux,
and he's slugging it down like water."

Literary license

And so
by the afternoon of Aug. 25, the Ritz had been liberated by Ernest Hemingway.
Paris, too, had been liberated, by Gen. Jacques Leclerc's 2nd French Armored
Division and a number of American units, and there was bedlam in the streets.
Marshall later said that by the time his jeep had crawled through the mob scene
of ecstatic French citizens and reached the Seine, it had 67 bottles of
Champagne in it.

"That
evening," Westover, a 76-year-old retired history professor, told me,
"Marshall and I went down to the Ritz and joined up with Hemingway and
Col. Bruce for dinner. We all passed around a paper and each person signed
their names. We said we were the first people (from the outside) in
Paris." Carlos Baker's biography, "Ernest Hemingway, A Life
Story," says the writer decreed, "None of us will ever write a line
about these last 24 hours in delirium. Whoever tries it is a chump."

After
dinner, Marshall wrote, the waiter "slapped a Vichy tax on the bill.
Straightaway we arose as one man and told him: 'Millions to defend France,
thousands to honor your fare, but not one sou in tribute to Vichy.' "

The next
day, Hemingway hosted a lunch at the Ritz with several writers he knew -- Ira
Wolfert, Irwin Shaw, Time-Life's chief of correspondents Charles Wertenbaker
and Helen Kirkpatrick, a Chicago Daily News reporter.

"He
was a loose cannon," Helen Kirkpatrick Milbank told me. "He had
gathered all these forces around him. He was totally illegal, but that didn't
bother him. The interesting thing was that both Marty (Martha) Gellhorn, who
was then his wife, and Mary Welsh, who was later his wife, were in Paris at the
same time. First, I'd hear from Marty what an impossible man Hemingway was to
live with, and then Mary would be saying how impossible Marty was being.”

"During
that lunch, I said I wanted to go watch the victory parade and Hemingway said,
'What for? You can always see a parade, but you'll never again lunch at the
Ritz on the 26th of August, the day after Paris was liberated.'"

Later,
Hemingway would write letters to Mary Welsh, telling her about fighting the
Germans, but those who knew him say that when he talked about how many Germans
he had killed he was simply exercising his creative juices.

"Sure,
he always had a pistol," L'Allinec says, "but he never killed
any Germans."

In the
end, though, it's Hemingway the writer that everybody remembers -- or
almost everybody.

On the
convoy into Paris, Trefousse recalled, Hemingway was in a jeep behind him, and
"I told the French there was this great writer in the jeep back there and
they said, 'Never heard of him.' Still, it was pretty amazing. Hemingway and
Paris on the same day."

As the
Allied forces prepared to take Paris in 1944, war correspondent Ernest
Hemingway was so competitive in his quest for the big story that he poached
another writer’s assignment for the prestigious magazine Collier’s.

In the
long, cruel struggle of World War II, opportunities for celebration were
scarce. But even among the era’s handful of “wish you were there”
moments—Russian and American troops meeting at Germany’s River Elbe in April
’45; V-J
Day in Times Square—for
sheer, cathartic hope, none surpassed the Liberation of Paris. The capital was
ultimately freed, on August 24-25, 1944, by a combination of troops from the
2nd French Armored Division, granted precedence by Eisenhower in his role as
Supreme Allied Commander; resistance fighters, of many nationalities, who had
been battling the Germans in and around Paris for years; and Americans,
primarily from the 4th Infantry Division.

LIFE
photographer Ralph Morse, now 96 years old, recalls being outside Paris in a
press camp—he was covering George Patton’s Third Army and its sweep toward the
Rhine for LIFE—when, he says, Ernest
Hemingway, who
was also in the camp, offered a suggestion.

“I knew
Hemingway pretty well because his later wife, Mary, had worked for LIFE, and
she had reported with me on a few stories,” Morse told LIFE.com. “So, we’re in
this camp, waiting, and Hemingway says, ‘You know, the Germans can’t possibly
have mined every road into Paris. Why don’t we find a back road? We can be at
the Champs-Élysées before the troops get there.’ Of course, we did make it into
Paris . . . but not the way Hemingway wanted.”

“Hemingway’s
idea,” Morse recalls, “to get into Paris before U.S. troops headed in was
scuttled because someone—Maybe a reporter who wasn’t invited along? Who
knows?—someone leaked the plan to Patton, and before we knew it, the press camp
was surrounded by military police. Patton walks in and says, ‘If any of you
make a move toward Paris before the troops do, I’ll court martial you!’ Anyway,
we went in shortly afterward. It was a quick trip from the outskirts, because
there were so few Germans left to stop us.”

Strikes
in Paris—by railway workers, cops, postal workers—and a relentless guerrilla
resistance had shown that, by then, the Germans’ hold on the city was tenuous,
at best. When word spread that the Nazi military garrison in the capital had
surrendered, the streets erupted. Wine flowed. People laughed, sang “La

xxxxxx.wept."

“It was
an amazing sight, an amazing feeling,” Morse recalls. “So many people in the
streets, holding hands, everyone headed for the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de
Triomphe, the same way that everyone in New York heads to, say, Times Square
when something momentous happens. It really was . . . well, liberating.”

“One
thing that really stands out,” Morse says of those indelible days in Paris
more than six decades ago, “is the feeling of certainty in the
air. Everyone knew it was over. And I don’t mean the battle for
Paris. I mean the war. We all knew there was a lot of fighting left. The Battle
of the Bulge a few months later proved that, and who knew what was going to
happen in the Pacific? But when the Germans surrendered Paris, we all sensed it
was only a matter of time, and not much time, before we took Berlin.”

Friday
August 25 1944, a little over 68 years ago, marked the liberation of Paris by
the Allies during World War II and one of the greatest parties of all time.
Ernie "Pyle was stunned by the 'pandemonium of surely the greatest
mass joy that has ever happened.' The matter-of-fact reporter, lyricist
of the ordinary, found this extraordinary event hard to write about; he felt
'incapable,' 'inadequate' to describe the tide of emotion as they were 'kissed
and hauled literally red in the face'. There seemed to be flowers everywhere:
the women were all 'brightly dressed in white or red blouses and colorful
peasant skirts, with flowers in their hair and big flashy earrings.
Everybody was throwing flowers. And yet above the happy din he
could still hear sporadic explosions, sniper sots and the rattle of
machine-guns. Celebration and killing danced together in an
ecstatic fete folle."

"Making a nuisance of himself trying to supply what he called 'gen' was
the heavily bearded and heavy-drinking American novelist Ernest Hemingway
of Collier's, carrying an automatic pistol (quite against the Geneva
convention) on the belt he had taken from a dead German with its old Prussian
slogan GOTT MIT UNS ('God is on our side'), happily playing the guerrilla
leader to a dozen FFI (Free French, Commander Kelly) youngsters, and eager to
enter Paris, 'the city I love best in all the world'."

Hemingway,
1899 – 1961

The
world famous Ritz hotel in the Place Vendomme "had actually been
'liberated' earlier that afternoon by the armed civilian Ernest Hemingway.
The author of The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell
Tolls arrived in a convoy of jeeps carrying French FFI partisans, American
officers, and numerous bottles.

They crossed the Pont de Sevres, went
through the sixteenth arrondissement -dodging the odd sniper - to the Arc de
Triomphe, down the Champs Elysees to the Travellers Club for champagne, on to
the Cafe de la Paix in the boulevard des Capucines for more of it, and
eventually pulled up at the back entrance of the Hotel Ritz in Rue Cambon.
When Hemingway declared he had come to liberate the place, the manager
Claude Auzello said, 'Leave your gun by the door and come in.' Hemingway
walked up to the bar and asked for yet more champagne. Nobody really knows
which bar it was, but the Ritz has subsequently renamed the little one by the
Cambon entrance the Hemingway Bar. The manager was soon assuring
Hemingway and the others that the Ritz had done its bit for Resistance by
keeping the very best wine, the premiers grands crus classe A, safe from the
Germans. We saved the Chateau Cheval Blanc!' he said happily.
'Well, go get it' said Hemingway, and the heavy sweating writer slugged
down the great Bordeaux like fruit juice.

Friday 25 August was a warm, lovely night in the gardens and streets of
liberated Paris. Wine flowed like water, and
grateful parisienne women were generous to the liberating
troops."

Source all quotes: Ian Fleming's Commandos: The Story of 30 Assault Unit
in World War II, Nicholas Rankin, 2011. www.amzn.com/0199782822

Commander Kelly says, "War has moments of pure horror such as the Massacre
at Malmedy (see earlier post, Massacre at Malmedy, 10/12/12), but also
moments of ecstatic joy such as the liberation of Paris and the Ritz Hotel bar.
What a night that must have been!"

The
Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris
by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Then,
when that same writer asked for assistance in getting a seat on the
journalists’ plane to Europe, he refused, forcing the writer to instead spend
17 days as the only civilian aboard a weapons transport ship “loaded with
explosives” — an incredibly risky move, as those ships had been high-value Nazi
targets throughout the war, and “tens of thousands” of Allied soldiers died on
them.

The
writer in question, who later confronted Hemingway in a “spectacular” argument,
was Martha Gellhorn — Hemingway’s wife.

“The
Hotel on Place Vendome” by Tilar J. Mazzeo tells the tale of the Hotel Ritz, a
landmark so imbued with glamour that it was the only hotel in Paris the Nazis
ordered to stay open during the war.

The
antics at and around it during World War II were often shocking, as one half
was reserved for high-level Nazis — Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command,
morphine-addicted cross-dresser Hermann Göring, lived in its grandest suite —
while the other was open for business to sympathetic celebrities and socialites
and citizens of neutral countries.

Hemingway,
never one to tamp down his machismo, took it upon himself to not just report
the war, but fight it as well, hoping to use the Ritz, his longtime favorite,
as his base of operations.

Once it
was evident that the Allies were retaking Paris, Hemingway, then 45, was
determined not just to be the first war correspondent back at the Ritz, but to
“liberate” it from the Nazis.(Although, Mazzeo writes, the bellicose, alcoholic
author was really just “keen to be the first to liberate more or less
anything.”)

“Sweet-talking
the commander, General Raymond ‘Tubby’ Barton, with his war stories,” she
writes, “he had cobbled together his own private brigade more or less through
sheer personal charisma.”

Hemingway
had “a public-relations officer, a private cook, a camp photographer and his
own supply of Scotch whiskey.” Forbidden from carrying a weapon as a
correspondent, he “made sure his personal platoon carried every weapon
imaginable, both German and American.”

He
called them his band of “irregulars,” and set out to “liberate” the French
village of Saint-Pois. He showed his plan to a photographer friend, who later
said he had a “bad feeling” about the operation.

“The
Allied regiment, as Ernest showed him, was planning to take the village from a
route shown on the left. His idea was to take a shortcut on the map and drive
into the village from the right, beating the military to the glory.”

Hemingway
“commandeered a motorcycle with a sidecar,” and “loaded up the sidecar with
whiskey and machine guns.”

Riding
toward Saint-Pois, it didn’t take long until the Germans attacked.

“One
shell exploded 10 yards from the motorcycle,” and the motorcycle driver hit the
brakes, sending Hemingway flying into a ditch.

Bullets
landed all around him as a Panzer tank made its approach, but he was saved when
the Nazis diverted their attention to “an Allied regiment on the other flank.”

Having
failed to liberate the town, Hemingway set his sites back on the Ritz, hoping
to arrive there to cover France’s liberation before the rest of the press
corps.

He took
a four-man crew, “met up with another dozen or so French Maquis fighters,” and
decided that they would “fight their way into the capital as a private
militia.” Despite their ragtag nature, this militia had uniforms, as Hemingway,
he wrote to a paramour, “clothed them with clothing of cavalry recon outfit
which had been killed.”

Hemingway
was basically playing soldier — in opposition to every rule governing the
behavior of war correspondents. His entourage having grown to also include a
colonel in the OSS (the precursor to the CIA), two Army historians, and a
resistance fighter, Hemingway even killed some Nazis, as he “had purportedly
blown up with a hand grenade some Germans hiding in a cellar.”

As they
fought alongside him, Hemingway’s crew began to take on his mannerisms.

“The
‘irregulars’ . . . went around spitting short sentences from the corners of
their mouths in their different languages,” writes Mazzeo, “[and carried] more
hand grenades and brandy than a full division.”

The
famed author and his bizarre band of brothers went out nightly to “harass the
remaining Germans between Rambouillet and Paris.” Later, Hemingway took his
crew toward Paris via back roads, hoping to beat the US troops into the city
and was finally stopped when someone informed Gen. George S. Patton of his activities.

The US
Army commander surrounded the press camp with military police and told the
reporters, “If any of you make a move toward Paris before the troops do, I’ll
court-martial you!”

Ultimately,
Hemingway was not the first journalist back to Paris, perhaps because “his
march on Paris seemed to be punctuated with long, winey stops,” Mazzeo writes.

“By the
time their Jeep had even reached the River Seine, [one of the war historians]
counted 67 bottles of champagne in it.”

We were
at the Ritz Bar. I was on my third martini and Hemingway was on his fourth when the bartender made a speech. Though the accolades were directed at him, Hemingway leaned into my ear and said, “Bartenders should stick to what they do best — bartending.”

I had to
agree. The acoustics weren’t conducive to formal speeches, especially long ones. Besides, our cocktails were getting warm. We chinked glasses, exchanged nods and sneaked sips during the toast.

1929?
1949? Nope: Aug. 24, 1999. The Hemingway in question? Jack Hemingway, first son of Ernest and Hadley, father to Margaux and Mariel. The occasion? An exclusive party to celebrate the 55th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s “liberation” of the Ritz.For
those of you who don’t know this particular footnote in Hemingway lore, just after the Allied troops declared victory on Aug. 24, 1944, Hemingway,

with a band of irregulars just outside the Paris periphery, sped straight to the Place Vendtme.

Their
self-appointed mission was to relieve the Nazi officials of their occupation headquarters: the Hotel Ritz. That night, as word spread that the war was over, Papa and crew played host to one of the most jubilant parties the Ritz had ever seen. Fifty-five years later, people were still celebrating, and still remembering.

I was
just happy I wasn’t paying for the $20 martinis.

J

ack
Hemingway, now 75, looked strikingly like his father. The Hemingways are big
men, with broad shoulders and strong arms. Jack was even sporting a neatly trimmed white beard, reminiscent of Ernest in his Cuba days. But more
than anything, he sounded exactly like his father. When Jack told a story, right after the punch line, his head would fall back
and a roar would burst out of his throat. And just as with his father, it was
much more high-pitched than you would imagine a Hemingway to have.

How annoying
it must be to be the son of Ernest Hemingway. How could anyone live up to a man
who wrestled with bears, lions and bulls, won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes and boasted of sleeping with every woman that he had ever cared to?

Still,
Jack has held his own.

While
his father was liberating the Ritz, Jack — an OSS officer — had just escaped from behind enemy lines. Over the years he has accumulated stories of his own to tell — and then he told them. Like Ernest’s brother and various
ex-wives, Jack wrote his side of life with Papa, “The Misadventures of a Fly Fisherman:

My
Life With and Without Papa.” This biography of an absentee, alcoholic father is
surprisingly well-written.

After
shadowing him for a nervous half-hour, I finally got someone I had just met to introduce me.

“Jack,
I’d like you to meet Gentry Lane. She’s writing a book on Paris in the 1920s.”

“Oh
good! No one’s ever written anything like that before,” he laughed.

Normally
I’d smack anyone who laughed at my aspirations. But seeing as Gertrude Stein was his babysitter, I let it slide.

“It’s an
honor to meet you, Mr. Bumby,” I said. With gin-fueled courage I addressed him by his childhood nickname — the one by which Ernest refers to him in “A Moveable Feast.”

“I’ve
grown a bit since anyone’s called me that,” he laughed and patted his
girth.

We
talked about San Francisco, my hometown and his too for a while. He worked at the City of Paris department store and remembered when Playland was still open. I’m only 30, and know about these places only from a video I got for becoming a member of the local PBS affiliate, but I was thrilled to
have a common connection to a real live Hemingway.

What
impressed me most about Jack was that he wasn’t wearing shoes. Instead he was wearing slippers, little velvet ones with the Hemingway family crest embroidered in gold. They looked comfy. And they went with his suit. That made him the cooler Hemingway, I thought. Ernest, a man who favored a belt he pulled off a dead German, would never have the guts to wear little velvet slippers.

Switching
easily from English to French, Jack flowed from conversation to conversation with guests anxious to talk about his father or his father’s works. Some of them were not as well-versed as they should have been.

“Ernest
would be proud,” said someone during a lull in the speechifying.

“I don’t
think he would’ve liked all this,” Jack whispered to me, motioning to the room full of Parisian society people, dainty hors d’oeuvres
and a sleepy background band sporting berets and playing “La Vie en Rose.”

“He
would have liked that we’re drinking,” I said.

“Yes, he
would have liked that.”

But Jack
Hemingway liked this party. The crowd was animated and the setting was pure Ritz, classy in every way. Ambassadors, journalists and Ritz regulars all vied for a bit of Hemingway’s attention. And, in true
Hemingway fashion, he seemed to be most pleased when talking to a pretty girl.

On the
day Allied troops marched into Paris in August 1944, writer Ernest Hemingway, a
war correspondent at the time, made straight for one of its most luxurious
hotels and ``liberated'' the Ritz bar.
At least, that is how Hemingway liked to joke about the event at what became
his favorite Parisian watering hole.

On the
day Allied troops marched into Paris in August 1944, writer Ernest Hemingway, a
war correspondent at the time, made straight for one of its most luxurious
hotels and "liberated" the Ritz bar.

At
least, that is how Hemingway liked to joke about the event at what became his
favorite Parisian watering hole.As the French capital celebrates the 50th
anniversary of its liberation from Nazi rule Thursday, the Ritz will pay
tribute to him by reopening the bar named in his honor, cashing in on an
exploit that has become a legend.

According
to the Ritz official version, Hemingway, who was covering the war with General
George Patton's 3rd Army for the American magazine Collier's, was greeted by
the director of the prestigious hotel at the door.

He was
asked to leave his gun outside and then escorted to the bar where he ordered a
dry martini.

But one
of the few surviving eyewitnesses has a much more colorful story to tell.

"It
was incredible, incredible. It was breathtaking to see him behave as if the
hotel was his home," Lucienne Elmiger, the 76-year-old widow of the former
manager of the Ritz, said in an interview from her country house near Auxerre
south of Paris.

At about
2 o'clock on the afternoon of Aug. 25, 1944, the day French troops rolled into
the capital, Elmiger was busy in the lobby when the plush stillness of the
august establishment on the 18th-Century Place Vendome was shattered.

A
swashbuckling figure strode into the lobby of stately pink marble columns and
mirrored panels.

"He
entered like a king, and he chased out all the British people who had arrived
an hour earlier. He was dressed in khaki, but his shirt was open on his bare
chest. He had a leather belt under his big stomach, with his gun beating
against his thigh."

Hemingway
marched through the lobby and the restaurant, in a shouting match with his
foes: "I'm the one who is going to occupy the Ritz. We're the Americans.
We're going to live just like in the good old days."

He
barked at the British in the language of the former German occupiers:
"Raus, raus (get out, get out)!"

Hemingway's
rivals quickly gave up and fled, and he made a bee-line for the bar where he
ordered drinks for the fellow correspondents who had conquered the Ritz with
him.

The
Nazis, who had requisitioned the landmark to house German top brass on their
visits to the capital, including air force head Herman Goering and propaganda
master Joseph Goebbels, had deserted the hotel much earlier.

"He
had presence, the way people know Hemingway, but no chic. My husband was not
very happy to see this happening, in his Ritz," Elmiger said
disapprovingly.

Jacqueline
Tavernier-Courbin, among those with Hemingway at the time, and now a professor
of English Literature at Ottawa University, says he also swept through the
cellars.

She
recounts that he climbed to the roof where his party - intent on chasing
Germans - fired bursts of gunfire which brought down nothing apart from a
clothesline full of Ritz linen sheets.

That
afternoon, philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre and his companion Simone de
Beauvoir called on the American.

According
to his brother Leicester, de Beauvoir and Hemingway did their utmost to
persuade Sartre to leave them alone together and return home to the Left Bank.

"Look,
why don't you get going? We're going to stay here and do a little drinking and
serious talking," Leicester quotes de Beauvoir as telling Sartre.

In
"The True Gen," a book about the writer by Denis Brian, a friend of
Hemingway's reports de Beauvoir emerged from the Ritz only the following
morning.

The Ritz
was to become an essential part of Hemingway's Paris, the city where he began
his career as a writer. "When you're in Paris, the only good reason for
not staying at the Ritz is lack of money," he once said.

As in
the writer's heyday, the small Hemingway Bar, which will reopen on Aug. 25
after a two-year closure, will once again serve his favorite cocktails, and the
Spanish bite-size "tapas" he was fond of.

A bronze
bust of Hemingway rests on the counter. The panel above the fireplace is hung
with pictures of Hemingway, including two snaps of him shortly before he
entered Paris.

Hotel
owners are keen to build on Hemingway's legacy to turn the bar into the
favorite haunt of literary Paris. Writers and poets will have the chance to
receive their mail there.

This
would give the place unrivaled standing as the only literary bar on the Right
Bank of the river Seine, traditionally an affluent area whose bourgeois
character contrasts with the more intellectual Left Bank.

After
more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd
Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. German resistance was
light, and General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison,
defied an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris' landmarks
and burn the city to the ground before its liberation. Choltitz signed a formal
surrender that afternoon, and on August 26, Free French General Charles de
Gaulle led a joyous liberation march down the Champs d'Elysees.

Paris
fell to Nazi Germany on June 14, 1940, one month
after the German Wehrmachtstormed into France. Eight days later, France
signed an armistice with the Germans, and a puppet French state was set up with
its capital at Vichy. Elsewhere, however, General Charles de Gaulle and the
Free French kept fighting, and the Resistance sprang up in occupied France to
resist Nazi and Vichy rule.

The
French 2nd Armored Division was formed in London in late 1943 with the express
purpose of leading the liberation of Paris during the Allied invasion of
France. In August 1944, the division arrived at Normandy under the command of
General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc and was attached to General George S. Patton's
3rd U.S. Army. By August 18, Allied forces were near Paris, and workers in the
city went on strike as Resistance fighters emerged from hiding and began
attacking German forces and fortifications.

At his
headquarters two miles inland from the Normandy coast, Supreme Allied
Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower had a dilemma. Allied
planners had concluded that the liberation of Paris should be delayed so as to
not divert valuable resources away from important operations elsewhere. The
city could be encircled and then liberated at a later date.

On
August 21, Eisenhower met with de Gaulle and told him of his plans to bypass
Paris. De Gaulle urged him to reconsider, assuring him that Paris could be
reclaimed without difficulty. The French general also warned that the powerful
communist faction of the Resistance might succeed in liberating Paris, thereby
threatening the re-establishment of a democratic government. De Gaulle politely
told Eisenhower that if his advance against Paris was not ordered, he would
send Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division into the city himself.

On
August 22, Eisenhower agreed to proceed with the liberation of Paris. The next
day, the 2nd Armored Division advanced on the city from the north and the 4th
Infantry Division from the south. Meanwhile, in Paris, the forces of German
General Dietrich von Choltitz were fighting the Resistance and completing their
defenses around the city. Hitler had ordered Paris defended to the last man,
and demanded that the city not fall into Allied hands except as "a field
of ruins." Choltitz dutifully began laying explosives under Paris' bridges
and many of its landmarks, but disobeyed an order to commence the destruction.
He did not want to go down in history as the man who had destroyed the
"City of Light"--Europe's most celebrated city.

The 2nd
Armored Division ran into heavy German artillery, taking heavy casualties, but
on August 24 managed to cross the Seine and reach the Paris suburbs. There,
they were greeted by enthusiastic civilians who besieged them with flowers,
kisses, and wine. Later that day, Leclerc learned that the 4th Infantry
Division was poised to beat him into Paris proper, and he ordered his exhausted
men forward in a final burst of energy. Just before midnight on August 24, the
2nd Armored Division reached the Hótel de Ville in the heart of Paris.

German
resistance melted away during the night. Most of the 20,000 troops surrendered
or fled, and those that fought were quickly overcome. On the morning of August
25, the 2nd Armored Division swept clear the western half of Paris while the
4th Infantry Division cleared the eastern part. Paris was liberated.

In the
early afternoon, Choltitz was arrested in his headquarters by French troops.
Shortly after, he signed a document formally surrendering Paris to de Gaulle's
provincial government. De Gaulle himself arrived in the city later that
afternoon. On August 26, de Gaulle and Leclerc led a triumphant liberation
march down the Champs d'Elysees. Scattered gunfire from a rooftop disrupted the
parade, but the identity of the snipers was not determined.

De
Gaulle headed two successive French provisional governments until 1946, when he
resigned over constitutional disagreements. From 1958 to 1969, he served as French
president under the Fifth Republic.